boom town

Examples of boom town in the following topics:

• The Growth of the Cotton Industry

  • Additionally, the development of large-scale mills and metal machine tools dramatically increased textile production in northern mill towns in the early 1800s.
  • Though cotton was primarily grown for export to Europe, this textile boom in New England created an important domestic market for southern cotton producers.

• Hooverville

  • Homelessness exploded during the Great Depression resulting in the massive outgrowth of shanty towns, called in that period ‘Hoovervilles'.
  • "Hooverville" was the popular name for shanty towns built by homeless people during the Great Depression.
  • When the economy began a boom in 1940, unemployment fell and shanty eradication programs destroyed the nation's Hoovervilles.

• The New Era

  • As electrification reached a growing number of cities and towns, consumers demanded new products such as light bulbs, refrigerators, and toasters.
  • Oil booms in Texas, Oklahoma and California enabled the United States to dominate world petroleum production, which became even more important in an age of automobiles and trucks.
  • President Herbert Hoover advocated individualism and business enterprise, but his policies that created an economic boom enabled credit extensions and speculation that resulted in the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

• The Baby Boom

  • The end of World War II in 1945 brought a baby boom to many countries, especially Western ones.
  • There are many factors that contributed to the baby boom.
  • The baby boom triggered booms in housing, consumption, and the labor force.
  • An estimated 77.3 million Americans were born during this demographic boom in births.
  • Describe the optimism of the baby boom era following World War II.

• The Gastonia Strike of 1929

  • This boom was to be short lived however, and the prosperity that the workers enjoyed soon disappeared.
  • Upon hearing about the conditions in the Loray Mill, Fred Beal of the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU), a communist labor union, as well as a member of the Trade Union Unity League, began focusing his attention on the small town of Gastonia.
  • Nearly 100 masked men destroyed the NTWU's headquarters on April 18 and as a result, the NTWU started a tent city on the outskirts of town that was protected by armed strikers at all times.

• Conclusion: An Industrializing Economy

  • The transportation revolution also made it possible to ship agricultural and manufactured goods throughout the country and enabled rural people to travel to towns and cities for employment opportunities.
  • New industrial towns, including Waltham, Lowell, and countless others, dotted the landscape of the Northeast.
  • The expansion of the American economy also made it prone to the boom-and-bust cycle, in which runaway land speculation led to economic downturns during which wage workers lost their employment and investors lost their assets.

• Mill Towns and Company Towns

  • One of the first company towns in the United States was Pullman, Chicago, developed in the 1880s just outside the Chicago city limits.
  • The town, entirely company-owned, provided housing, markets, a library, churches, and entertainment for the 6,000 company employees and an equal number of dependents.
  • In 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court required Pullman to dissolve their ownership of the town.
  • At their peak there were more than 2,500 company towns, housing 3% of the US population.
  • Mill towns, sometimes planned, built, and owned as a company town, grew in the shadow of the industries.

• Changes in Agricultural Production

  • Yet as the decade progressed the agricultural sector did not fare as well as other industries such as automobiles that were seeing a boom through mass production.
  • This downturn in the rural economy also had a social effect on the farm, with many young workers who had experienced the world beyond their hometowns during the war chose to move to larger towns and cities.
  • In fact, many did not remain down on the farm and instead became part of a great migration of youth from farms to nearby towns and smaller cities.

• The New Immigrants on Strike

  • Many of the female immigrants toiled in the garment industry-- particularly in the Triangle and Leiserson shirtwaist factories-- which was booming in turn of the century New York.
  • Prompted by one mill owner's decision to lower wages when a new law shortening the workweek went into effect in January, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers at nearly every mill within a week.

• Economic Booms and Busts

  • The Market Revolution produced an upsurge in speculative investments, which resulted in periods of economic boom and bust.
  • These speculative investments were frequently made with borrowed funds, resulting in large-scale cycles of boom and bust in the early 1800s.
  • Cotton, at first a small-scale crop in the South, boomed following Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in 1793.